As organizations become more distributed and applications become more centralized, the corporate WAN is destined to play an increasingly important role in providing remote users with fast access to critical business applications. Optimizing the performance of applications over costly WAN links has become a critical issue and top priority for IT organizations.

To better understand the current state of the WAN, as well as plans that could affect WAN architectures and application performance in 2007, Blue Coat conducted a comprehensive survey of IT executives in December 2006.

This document presents the key findings and analysis of data collected from more than 1,300 enterprise IT executives in 40 countries around the world.

The survey results highlight certain key trends, including:

• Increasing consolidation of remote servers and applications into the data center
• Increasing application performance problems experienced by remote users
• Increasing integration of the Web into business processes
• Increasing amount of encrypted SSL application traffic
• Increasing Internet traffic as a percentage of overall WAN traffic
• Increasing number of mobile users working outside the WAN